Using Role Play to Build B2B Content Creation and Knowledge Bases (AKA the Secret Shopper Game)

Are you struggling to get good B2B capabilities and service content from your team of experts to help with SEO? If you’re NOT, you’re the exception – this is a huge problem and one of the hardest tasks in SEO. The problem of course is that experts are busy. They often resent having more added to their plate and will often push back to be excluded from “a marketing task.” What’s needed is an efficient, asynchronous way to tap into their knowledge that is realistic and has high perceived value to the experts, while being minimally disruptive.

What Doesn’t Work: “Fill in answers to the questions in this list.”

Many people will try to get these answers by sending a long list to experts asking them to “fill in answers” and send it back. We’ve tried this many times, and it rarely works. The list feels like a formidable task, and it gets pushed to the side as a low priority. If you get 20% response rate, you’re lucky. We’ve even heard Dilbert jokes about how HR teams find out who is least busy by sending out a questionnaire and seeing who replies first. If you think this will work for you, then by all means try it. I think at the end of the task you’ll be disappointed with the outcome and it will be hard to “ask again” for the content.

(CC) West Point via Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Customer Simulations via Role Play Emails

Role play may sound a bit like a children’s game to many, but it is a proven, classic method for communicating in business for gaining insights in a natural manner. Email is an asynchronous, omnipresent form that is baked into the workflow of everyone already, and is likely to be far more compatible with most experts’ schedules.

Laying the Groundwork

Prerequisite 1: Gain Leadership Buy-in. For this to work, you need the directive to come from top-down, with your corporate leadership encouraging and, ideally, participating. Some will get it right away, and others will need you to make a clear connection to the bottom line.

Prerequisite 2: Make the Connection to Traffic and Revenue – In order for participants to see the true business value of this exercise, they need to understand that answering peoples questions is the core of modern SEO. Updating the recency of the team’s understanding about SEO will help justify the effort.

Prerequisite 3: Make sure your experts realize that this exercise may free up time in the long run – Since the answers to these questions will be available online, these experts may be interrupted less, and when they are, the customer will be more informed. Furthermore, they will not be tasked with un-doing incorrect answers provided by the sames team when it makes their job harder!

Some may feel a bit insecure about “downloading” their experience, but answering these customer questions should only tap a very tiny percentage of their actual knowledge base. You may want to add author blocks to the answers to make connections between answers and experts to boost E-A-T associations and to stroke egos a bit. You may want to turn each question into a video QA featuring the experts, if they seem motivated by the exposure.

Prerequisite 4: Develop buyer personas. You probably already have these and they will be useful here. Identify the roles, job titles and situations that define your buyers context during an inquiry.

To Rank at the top of Google, your content must answer questions better than your competition, at scale.

Simulating Customer Questions

Use whatever format that customers currently use to ask questions online. We all know that you could use Slack, Asana or other cloud based collaboration tools for this – but it reduces realism – these tools are for internal communications and customers rarely have access. CRM and knowledge bases can work great, but just make sure that when the question arrives, it looks and feels the same as a customer question.

Role Play 1 – Service Questions

Create a list of 30 highly realistic, capability or service related questions harvested from customer-facing staff, trade shows, search engines. If the sales team can answer the question easily and confidently, then don’t use it Focus on a list of questions where the expert could add depth to the content and build confidence to a buyer well into the purchase journey.

Using your buyer personas, create text email templates with the question – AS IF IT CAME FROM A PROSPECT. I recommend using very realistic narrative and dialogue form, with company names, job titles and more. Save these templates for use in your email series.

Add urgency to the emails – hinting at possible new business (aka job security.)

“Our CEO received a quote from <competitor> and wanted to see if you offered this <service.>”

“We have a shortlist meeting this Thursday, but had this question about <service.>”

“I’ve been asked to send out RFPs for <service> type help, but had a quick question and it would be a huge help.”

etc…

Create a spreadsheet (here’s a template in Google Sheets) to track the creation, sending and responses of experts in your company. You may choose to use a task manager (aka Asana) tool for your team, but don’t use it to send the questions to the experts – since this is unlikely how a customer would email them.

Space out the questions: Ideally, you would only ever have one open question at a time in their inbox. The spreadsheet above has a “next question” date.

Send it to the experts! You may wish to let the experts know in the emails that this is x of y emails, so they don’t think the task is going to go on forever.

Follow up on poor answers: Use “follow ups” in customer’s voice for answers that are too short or confusing.

Motivate/Gamify – Consider a reward for participation and the best content – your company culture will dictate this.

Use the answers as the core for new content for the website, blog posts, and even video content.

Evaluate how it worked, modify and put it in your toolkit!

Adapt, but Don’t Dilute

Based on my years in the industry, if these efforts are easy, something is wrong.

Your team is going to be very different, perhaps smaller in number or more or less experienced, so adapting these ideas will be essential as long as you don’t strip it down too far. Push-back is inevitable, often from your most valuable, and busy experts, so be ready to explain your SEO reasoning to the whole team.